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And Their Screams Are The Music Singing Me To Sleep On Rainy Nights
In haste, so can’t comment yet (hint: project management? RANDOM VERY DIRTY WORDS) but Dan Rubenfield has some fun grenades to throw in response to the “OMG RMT BAD” post making the rounds.
But I have comments. Oh yes. Also, in response to some other posts, my Vision Statement on how to make player crafting in a virtual world not totally suck!
And yes, this is completely to publically shame myself into actually making a good post later.
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about 4 years ago
Dan’s off his rocker on this one.
There are MMOs that do fine, which disproves his idea that the problem is ‘unsolvable’.
But those games aren’t professional grind fests with camp spots that spawn regularly and in the same place down to the second, now are they?
about 4 years ago
I love Dan’s logic. “We can’t beat them with CSR so let’s join them. Don’t like what i said? Shut up.” I think Bill Clinton tried something similar.
His summary of problems is good but he missed a teeny tiny problem with his strategy: exploitation. Because everything in a video game is a 1 or 0 they can be readily made just by tricking the software into make extra 1s and 0s. Prime case in point was the guy who found a dupe exploit in EQ2. He promptly used it to mint money up until the devs found out and CSR banned his accounts. Only problem was he’d destroyed the economy by floating boatloads of money from his duping. And while farmers can be controlled by his proposed solution, exploiters cannot. And the exploiters can always undersell you because they can mint 1s and 0s at will. Considering it took 6 months to figure out the EQ2 dupe exploit you’re going to fall flat eventually because the exploiters lose nothing by undercutting your pricing. In the meantime your economy goes to crap and perhaps even collapses.
about 4 years ago
Forget about all the arguements about how much RMTs hurt the economy and the game experience, or if the people complaining are just whiners. It doesn’t matter. That arguement is moot and pointless.
What matters is that there is no way to win the War on RMTs. There is demand, and where there is demand there will be supply, and you can’t stop the market by targeting suppliers. That’s like trying to stop the problem of spam emails by blocking one sender at a time; it takes longer for you to block each one than it does for another spammer to start spamming. It’s exactly like the War on Drugs; no matter what you do, the supply and the market will only continue, and the harder you try to stop the Drugs the higher the profits of the dealers become. Prohibition has NEVER worked in any system anywhere anytime where the individuals running the system didn’t have 100% full-time extreme totalitarian control over every aspect of the population’s life … and usually not even then.
If you are a person that believes that the War on Drugs actually stands a chance of being useful, then you are welcome to the added delusion that the War on RMTs will do any good. However, if you’ve accepted that the WoD is pointless, it’s not even a tenth of a leap to realize that the WoRMTs is just as pointless.
about 4 years ago
Oh, there is one other option: cancel the demand for RMTs out by making a game in which RMTs are pointless. But the few games I’ve seen where that was accomplished were also dull and boring, IMO. I’m not sure you can have a game without any sort of economy that will appeal to a broad player base; economic games are just more fun. Again, IMO.
about 4 years ago
And the exploiters can always undersell you because they can mint 1s and 0s at will.
I’m pretty sure in any system where the exploiters can do that, then so can the developers.
about 4 years ago
I like his idea. Didnt Sony do this with special servers in EQ2? How did that turn out?
The entire WoD/WoRMTs is way off. His proposal ends the War because it gives everyone – the farmers, the players, the developers – the tools to buy and sell gold. The WoD attempts to punish/restrict the seller and the buyer, with varying degrees of success and a lot of pain and suffering all around.
In the least, duh, I’d love to see this tested on a single server. A new one.
And I’d really love to know how it worked out for Sony. I wish I followed EQ2, but ugh that art direction…
about 4 years ago
“Oh, there is one other option: cancel the demand for RMTs out by making a game in which RMTs are pointless.”
That IS the only solution. Anything else is just robbing Peter to pay Paul. By which I mean the only thing that changed is where the checks go.
Is there much influence peddling in City of __? Seems like money is rather meaningless in that game. I’m sure douchebag character levellers are still rampant though…
Oh, and bullshit on a stick if RMT doesn’t harm the game at large. Exploiting hunters farming Dire Maul bosses specifically and drastically decimated the prices of Major Health/Mana pots for 2 months across nearly every server in WoW – putting just about everyone playing the ACTUAL game out of “business”. Blizzard finally gets off their ass and fixes/bans the most egregious of the offenders and overnight the potion market went batshit loco. So raiding costs for any guild/person who doesn’t have a dedicated HerbAlch farm regiment securely in tow was boned for weeks while the market tried to stabilize.
about 4 years ago
Hellfire, see TPRJones comment:
“But the few games I\’e2\’80\’99ve seen where that was accomplished were also dull and boring, IMO.”
in regards to your query:
“Is there much influence peddling in City of __?”
Its not the only solution because games like that, well, suck.
Market share aint no liar!*
* Maybe a fibber.
about 4 years ago
Actually even in CoH/CoV there is influence sales. Fairly stable if not terribly lucrative. Also its not as player irritating since its solely to help keep a new character on a server up to date in enhancements. Other players just don’t really notice/care since it doesn’t have any percieved impact on them such as being outbid on items.
In the end the war on rmt, like the war on drugs, makes great propaganda, a good soapbox for the OMG I’m better than you moralists (*coughlumcough*) and a nice ignore the man behind the curtain bugbear to keep a segment of players focused on rather than the actual flaws in any given game (they’re going to complain about something, let it be something you can blame on evil foreigners- especially asians).
about 4 years ago
EQ2′s RMT server wasn’t a “put in an order, we pull the item out of our ass for you” deal. They were just brokering the deal: taking the place of eBay, not the seller. As I understand it.
And yes, there are people who sell influence in COX, but the people who buy it lack either connections or brains. Money is only good for buying enhancements and changing your costume, and with all the mucking around with costumes that goes on any character more than a month old probably has at least a few free costume change tokens sitting around. For enhancements, your needs outstrip your earnings in the 20s, but by the mid-30s the situation reverses and you can’t give that shit away fast enough.
about 4 years ago
OMG I’m better than you!
about 4 years ago
The entire WoD/WoRMTs is way off. His proposal ends the War because it gives everyone – the farmers, the players, the developers – the tools to buy and sell gold. The WoD attempts to punish/restrict the seller and the buyer, with varying degrees of success and a lot of pain and suffering all around.
That doesn’t make the comparison invalid at all. His solution, to have the developers do sales directly, would be similar to the government legalizing drugs and then having the government itself sell them. The party enforcing the prohibition switches to selling the goods. As long as they keep the prices reasonable enough to discourage a black market, it’s a fine idea, IMO.
EQ2 went another route. The WoD equivalent would be the government legalizing drugs in certain cities, and allowing dealers to do the sales to the users, but taxing it and regulating it so they keep it “honest”. That way users don’t have to worry about getting a bad batch and sellers don’t have to worry about going to jail. Another fine idea, IMO.
And yes, Hellfire, if you want RMTs to go away entirely, then designing your game to make them irrelevant IS the only solution. Attack the demand, and you can actually make a difference.
Pretty much the ONLY solution that doesn’t work in the slightest in these situations is prohibition, to attempt to attack the supply without abating the demand. You can do it if your “police” outnumber the users and dealers combined, but we don’t live in such a police state and game developers can’t afford to hire individual CSR reps to personally monitor every player.
about 4 years ago
You know, I’m not much on accounting and all that, but this issue always makes me think of a new charging model.
Team up with some financial institution. Take your game and give everything in it a monetary value. Open up anonymous savings accounts for each account your player owns with the financial institution, the ownership of which would belong to you and the player. If they find an Uber Sword of Rabbit Slaying, they can put it on the market. When it’s sold, the real dollar amount that was assigned to it is transfered from the buyer’s account to the seller’s account. The user can pull money out of his account at any time, and can put money in using a credit card. When the account runs dry and your subscription fee comes due, their credit card is automatically hit for the fee.
Here’s where the real trick of it comes in… You can only allow X ammount of dollars worth of equipment to circulate in your game based on your player base. By this model, the farmability of your game would soon run dry, causing your farmers to move on to greener pastures. The problem is that it also might break your game in the player’s eyes.
This is why I’m not an accountant.
about 4 years ago
I like Guildrum’s system. MtG:O sort of did that. [i]Sort of[/i].
about 4 years ago
The naysayers are eloquent, loud and few.
Microtransactions and direct item sales are the future. Proven in the asian market, proven in mass market social products (Habbo Hotel pulls down 5 mil a month in item sales).
It’s palatable, profitable, improves relations with the players and castrates parasitic business models.
But the thing to mull over is…
How do you alter your designs to work within the new sales model? The classic bullshit time=investment=accomplishment model we’ve been using doesn’t work particularly well anymore…
Maybe we should make a new game insteadof regurgitating dikumuds?
Just some more grenades.
about 4 years ago
I’ve never heard of this Rubenfield guy but I find it amusing how many people are falling for his trolling.
about 4 years ago
There’s always going to be lost battles in any war. That doesn’t mean you surrender, and it doesn’t mean that a victim of a parasite kills themselves. And that’s what a game is doing by selling in-game stuff for cash, at least “a little”.
Ask yourself how many players are willing to play a game where those who pay extra for stuff gets the stuffs, and those who don’t keep up become the have-nots. Ask yourself if you’re willing to play second fiddle to Bill Gates, or some reasonable facsimile.
There are ways to slow down the effects of farming and ways to catch cheaters/dupers and follow their “money trail”. It doesn’t take a genious to figure out that items created can be logged, and programs can be made to check those logs and who might have created something that doesn’t fit.
And why the hell are we still stuck with static spawns after all these years and all these problems?
about 4 years ago
I can already hear the cries \’e2\’80\’9cOHNOES. Sanctity of the Game!@!@ Purity of Economy!@!@ Money!=Accomplishment\’e2\’80\’9d.
You know what? Shut up.
You know what? Fuck you.
Okay, I got that off my chest. Sorry. You’re a designer, but I’m a player. Seriously, you don’t want your players to shut up. That would be a Bad Thing[tm].
There’s something to be said about the sanctity of the game and the purity of the economy. A *lot* to be said. The idea that there’s no way to beat these guys except to go to their level is a failure of imagination. Volumes have been written on why Station Exchange-style economics are bad for games in general, so I won’t re-hash them. I’ll just say that this player things that RMT is a Bad Thing[tm] and she won’t be playing any games that incorporate it.
Okay, sorry about the “Fuck you” thing…
about 4 years ago
From an economics point of view, RMT will never be defeated without removing 100% of the demand for it. Since that’s never going to happen without entirely removing an ingame economy, you are stuck with it.
about 4 years ago
“you are stuck with it.”
Of course. Fighting it is the best solution. I used to see this in the same light as the drug wars but as I work on my stupid little project, I realize it is more like drunk driving or murder…
about 4 years ago
Last I checked there wasn’t much in the way of a demand that needed to be filled with drunk driving or murder. How exactly can that be the basis for comparison?